Davorio

In 2019 the Italian composer and jazz musician Samuele Strufaldi was invited by djembé player Boris Pierrou to visit his village of Gohouo-Zagna in the Ivory Coast's Guemon region. Fascinated by the traditional culture he found there, Strufaldi recorded the villagers’ music and stories in the local Guéré language and then took the tapes back to Italy, where he and Pierrou wove them into a cross-cultural-conversation with the addition of contemporary jazz tropes and electronic elements, much as Damon Albarn did with his ‘field recordings’ on 2002's pre-Africa Express experiment, Mali Music. On ‘Cammino, Senza Sapere Dove’ Strufaldi adds rippling Rhodes piano and dub effects. On the title track, a feral free-jazz sax break honks gloriously over Pierrou's polyrhythmic djembé patterns. Elsewhere, the village recordings blend with lush but subtle and sympathetic washes of electronica and in between the fully-worked pieces are unmediated interludes of children clapping, snatches of traditional percussion and tribal chants, creating a series of aural snapshots of life in Gohouo-Zagna. It's all done with taste and informative liner notes explain the context and significance of each piece. Profits from the album will be used to help construct a library for the villagers.